Sunday, February 21, 2016

Yahoo! President and CEO Marissa Mayer delivers a keynote
during the Yahoo Mobile Developers Conference on February 18,
2016, at Nob Hill Masonic Center in San Francisco, California.Credit: Stephen Lam

Bataille’s insistent conjunction of the monstrous and the sacred is the subject of this book. Regarded by many as one of the most important thinkers of our time, and acknowledged as an important inﬂuence by such intellectuals as Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida, Bataille produced a corpus of wide-ranging writings bearing the monstrous marks of the affective and intellectual contradictions he also sought to produce in his readers. In the following chapters, I will specify some of the ways in which Bataille evokes monstrosity to elicit in himself and his audience an experience of simultaneous anguish and joy—an experience that he calls sacred. In particular, Bataille is fascinated with the ‘‘left-hand’’ sacred. In contradistinction to its lucent and form-conferring ‘‘right-hand’’ counterpart, the left-hand sacred is obscure and formless—not transcendent, pure, and beneﬁcent, but dangerous, ﬁlthy, and morbid. This sinister, deadly aspect of the sacred is at once embodied in, and communicated by, the monster. As we will see, it is in beholding the monster that one might experience the combination of ecstasy and horror that characterizes Bataille ’s notion of the sacred.

The dual etymology of ‘‘monster’’ reveals that aspect of the sacred that enticed Bataille. According to one vein of etymological study, the Latin monstrum derives from monstrare (to show or display). The monster is that which appears before our eyes as a sign of sorts; it is a demonstration. But another tradition emphasizes a more ominous point. Deriving from monere (to warn), the monster is a divine omen, a portent; it heralds something that yet remains unexpected, unforeseeable—as a sudden reversal of fortune. In the writings of Bataille, the monster functions as a monstrance, putting on display the sinister aspect of the sacred that Bataille sees as the key to a ‘‘sovereign’’ existence. But in doing so the monster presents us with a portent of something that we cannot precisely foresee, but something that, Bataille claims, can be paradoxically experienced in moments of simultaneous anguish and ecstasy: death.

Saturday, September 23, 2017

"With respect to the story's content, the frame thus acts
both as an inclusion of the exterior and as an exclusion
of the interior: it is a perturbation of the outside at the
very core of the story's inside, and as such, it is a blurring
of the very difference between inside and outside."

— Shoshana Felman on a Henry James story, p. 123 in
"Turning the Screw of Interpretation,"Yale French Studies No. 55/56 (1977), pp. 94-207.
Published by Yale University Press.

"The hero of 'The Zero Theorem' is a computer genius
called Qohen Leth (Christoph Waltz)…. He is the sole
resident of a derelict church, where, on a crucifix in front
of the altar, the head of Christ has been replaced by a
security camera. No prayers are ever said, and none are
answered."

Tuesday, August 30, 2016

"The quotes create the illusion
that the dead are still speaking
to the reader. Faust writes about
the efforts of spiritualists to believe
in an afterlife for their slain kin, but
she’s the one summoning spirits."

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Harold Rosenberg, "Art and Words," The New Yorker , March 29, 1969. From page 110:

"An advanced painting of this century inevitably gives rise
in the spectator to a conﬂict between his eye and his mind;
as Thomas Hess has pointed out, the fable of the emperor's
new clothes is echoed at the birth of every modemist art
movement. If work in a new mode is to be accepted, the
eye/mind conﬂict must be resolved in favor of the mind;
that is, of the language absorbed into the work. Of itself,
the eye is incapable of breaking into the intellectual system
that today distinguishes between objects that are art and
those that are not. Given its primitive function of
discriminating among things in shopping centers and on
highways, the eye will recognize a Noland as a fabric
design, a Judd as a stack of metal bins— until the eye's
outrageous philistinism has been subdued by the drone of
formulas concerning breakthroughs in color, space, and
even optical perception (this, too, unseen by the eye, of
course). It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that paintings
are today apprehended with the ears. Miss Barbara Rose,
once a promoter of striped canvases and aluminum boxes,
confesses that words are essential to the art she favored
when she writes, 'Although the logic of minimal art gained
critical respect, if not admiration, its reductiveness allowed
for a relatively limited art experience.' Recent art criticism
has reversed earlier procedures: instead of deriving principles
from what it sees, it teaches the eye to 'see' principles; the
writings of one of America's inﬂuential critics often pivot on
the drama of how he failed to respond to a painting or
sculpture the ﬁrst few times he saw it but, returning to the
work, penetrated the concept that made it signiﬁcant and
was then able to appreciate it. To qualify as a member of the
art public, an individual must be tuned to the appropriate
verbal reverberations of objects in art galleries, and his
receptive mechanism must be constantly adjusted to oscillate
to new vocabularies."

The former dealt with some philosophy and
mathematics related to graphic design.

The latter dealt with death and finality.

The New York Times today has an obituary
that, revisiting Sept. 3rd, unites the topics of
death and design.

Alvin Eisenman,
Graphic Design Educator,
Dies at 92

By DANIEL E. SLOTNIK
Published: September 10, 2013

Alvin Eisenman, a graphic designer who in 1951 became the first director of Yale’s graduate program for graphic design, the first offered by a major American university, died on Sept. 3 at his home, which he also designed, on Martha’s Vineyard. He was 92. More>>

Thursday, March 28, 2013

“She was dazzled by light and shade, by the confusing
duplication of reflections and of frames. All coming from
too many directions for the mind to take account of.
The various images bounced against each other
until she felt a desperate vertigo….”

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

"The universe, then, is less intimation
than cipher: a mask rather than a revelation
in the romantic sense. Does love meet with love?
Do we receive but what we give? The answer is
surely a paradox, the paradox that there arePlatonic universals beyond, but that the glass
is too dark to see them. Is there a light beyond
the glass, or is it a mirror only to the self?
The Platonic cave is even darker than Plato
made it, for it introduces the echo, and so
leaves us back in the world of men, which does
not carry total meaning, is just a story of events."

"Our secret culture is as frivolous as a willow on a tombstone. It's a wonderful thing– or it was. It was strong and dreadful, it was majestic and ruthless. It was a stranger to pity. And it's not for sale, ladies and gentlemen."

“An engineer by training, Hammer focused on the operational nuts and bolts of business.

Hammer’s relentless pursuit of ‘why?’ drove his entire career. ‘My modus operandi is simple,’ he once wrote, ‘though not always easy to carry out. I take nothing at face value. I approach all business issues and practices with the same skepticism: Why?’

A funeral will be held at 9:30 a.m. Friday, Sept. 5 in Stanetsky Memorial Chapel, 1668 Beacon St., Brookline. Interment will follow at the Shaarei Tefillah Section of the Chevra Shaas Cemetery at Baker Street Jewish Cemeteries in West Roxbury.”

He stayed that way for eight days, never what you could really call drunk, but certainly never anywhere near sober, and always with a bottle of Georgette's expensive scotch in one hand and a glass in the other. He did not talk at all except to say "Yes" or "No," mostly "No," when confronted with a direct question, and he never ate anything when they were there. It was like living in the same house with a dead person.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

“Kirk Browning… television director of ‘Live* From Lincoln Center,’ died on Sunday [Feb. 10, 2008] in Manhattan. He was 86.

The cause was a heart attack, his son, David, said.

… In addition to his ‘Live From Lincoln Center’ programs, 10 of which won Emmy Awards, Mr. Browning… directed, among other productions… the first TV show with Frank Sinatra as host (1957); and ‘Hallmark Hall of Fame’ music and drama specials (1951 to 1958).”

* The timestamp of this entry is, however, not live. The entry was actually produced at about 5:55 AM on Feb. 13. The timestamp of the entry, 5:01 PM on Lincoln’s Birthday, is a veiled reference to Cemetery Ridge, to the meadow in “Readings for Candlemas” (see also the previous two entries) and to a Gettysburg address.

Sunday, July 1, 2007

"Three times the concentred
self takes hold, three times
The thrice concentred self,
having possessed
The object, grips it
in savage scrutiny,
Once to make captive,
once to subjugate
Or yield to subjugation,
once to proclaim
The meaning of the capture,
this hard prize,
Fully made, fully apparent,
fully found."

"That's how it is, Easy," my Coach went on, his voice more in sorrow than in anger. "Yardage is all very well but you don't make a nickel unless you cross that old goal line with the egg tucked underneath your arm." He pointed at the football on his desk. "There it is. I had it gilded and lettered clear back at the beginning of the season, you looked so good and I had so much confidence in you– it was meant to be yours at the end of the season, at a victory banquet."

Friday, May 18, 2007

“Paul B. Davis ’07-’08, who contributed to a collection of student essays written in 2005 on the purpose and structure of a Harvard education, said that ‘the devil is in the details’….” From the weblog of Peter Woit:

“The New Yorker keeps its physics theme going this week with cover art that includes a blackboard full of basic equations from quantum mechanics.”

Friday, May 4, 2007

"At his final Paris campaign rally… Mr. Sarkozy declared himself the candidate of the 'silent majority,' tired of a 'moral crisis in France not seen since the time of Joan of Arc.'

'I want to turn the page on May 1968,' he said of the student protests cum social revolution that rocked France almost four decades ago.

'The heirs of May '68 have imposed the idea that everything has the same worth, that there is no difference between good and evil, no difference between the true and the false, between the beautiful and the ugly and that the victim counts for less than the delinquent.'

Denouncing the eradication of 'values and hierarchy,' Mr. Sarkozy accused the Left of being the true heirs and perpetuators of the ideology of 1968."

From the translator's introduction to Dissemination, by Jacques Derrida, translated by Barbara Johnson, University of Chicago Press, 1981, page xxxi —

"Both Numbers and 'Dissemination' are attempts to enact rather than simply state the theoretical upheavals produced in the course of a radical reevaluation of the nature and function of writing undertaken by Derrida, Sollers, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva and other contributors to the journal Tel Quel in the late 1960s. Ideological and political as well as literary and critical, the Tel Quel program attempted to push to their utmost limits the theoretical revolutions wrought by Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Mallarme, Levi-Strauss, Saussure, and Heidegger."

This is the same Barbara Johnson who has served as the Frederic Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard.

Johnson has attacked "the very essence of Logic"–

"… the logic of binary opposition, the principle of non-contradiction, often thought of as the very essence of Logic as such….

Now, my understanding of what is most radical in deconstruction is precisely that it questions this basic logic of binary opposition….

Instead of a simple 'either/or' structure, deconstruction attempts to elaborate a discourse that says neither 'either/or', nor 'both/and' nor even 'neither/nor', while at the same time not totally abandoning these logics either."

— "Nothing Fails Like Success," SCE Reports 8, 1980

Such contempt for logic has resulted, for instance, in the following passage, quoted approvingly on page 342 of Johnson's translation of Dissemination,from Philippe Sollers's Nombres (1966):

"The minimum number of rows– lines or columns– that contain all the zeros in a matrix is equal to the maximum number of zeros located in any individual line or column."

Thursday, March 8, 2007

"The logic behind such utterances is the logic
of binary opposition, the principle of non-contra-
diction, often thought of as the very essence of
Logic as such….

Now, my understanding of what is most radical
in deconstruction is precisely that it questions
this basic logic of binary opposition….

Instead of a simple 'either/or' structure,
deconstruction attempts to elaborate a discourse
that says neither "either/or", nor "both/and"
nor even "neither/nor", while at the same time
not totally abandoning these logics either."

Saturday, July 30, 2005

"The nine-fold square has centre, periphery, axes and diagonals. But all are present only in their bare essentials. It is also a sequence of eight triads. Four pass through the centre and four do not. This is the garden of Apollo, the field of Reason, sheltered by the Gate from the turmoil of the Delta, with its endless cycles of erasure and reinscription. This is the Temple of Solomon, as inscribed, for example, by a nine-fold compartmentation to provide the ground plan of Yale…."

"When New Haven was founded, the city was laid out into a grid of nine squares surrounded by a great wilderness.
Last year History of Art Professor Emeritus Vincent Scully said the original town plan reflected a feeling that the new city should be sacred.
Scully said the colony's founders thought of their new Puritan settlement as a 'nine-square paradise on Earth, heaven on earth, New Haven, New Jerusalem.'"

"Real and unreal are two in one:
New Haven
Before and after one arrives…."

Tonight is twelfth night in Australia; 4 AM Jan. 5
in New York City is 8 PM Jan. 5 in Sydney.

An October 6 entry:

Twenty-first Century Fox

On Sunday, October 6, 1889, the Moulin Rouge music hall opened in Paris, an event that to some extent foreshadowed the opening of Fox Studios Australia in Sydney on November 7, 1999. The Fox ceremonies included, notably, Kylie Minogue singing "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend."

Red Windmill

Kylie Minogue

For the mathematical properties of the red windmill (moulin rouge) figure at left, see Diamond Theory.

In accordance with the twelfth-night
"whirligig of time" theme,
here are two enigmatic quilt blocks:

Devil's Claws, or
Hourglass Var. 3

Yankee Puzzle, or
Hourglass Var. 5

One can approach these symbols in either a literary or a mathematical fashion. For a purely mathematical discussion of the differences in the two symbols' structure, see Diamond Theory. Those who prefer literary discussions may make up their own stories.

"Plato is wary of all forms of rapture other than reason's. He is most deeply leery of, because himself so susceptible to, the literary imagination. He speaks of it as a kind of holy madness or intoxication and goes on to link it to Eros, another derangement that joins us, but very dangerously, with the gods."

Friday, October 4, 2002

To honor the birth of these three noted spiritual leaders, I make the following suggestion: Use the mandorla as the New Orleans Mardi Gras symbol. Rice lives in New Orleans and LaBelle’s classic “Lady Marmalade” deals with life in that colorful city.

What, you may well ask, is the mandorla? This striking visual symbol was most recently displayed prominently at a meeting of U.S. cardinals in the Pope’s private library on Shakespeare’s birthday. The symbol appears in the upper half of a painting above the Pope.

The illustration below shows how Barbara G. Walker in her excellent book “The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets” describes the mandorla.

The Agony and the Ecstasy

Based on a novel by Irving Stone, this 1965 movie focuses on the relationship between Michelangelo (Charlton Heston) and Pope Julius II (Rex Harrison), who commissioned the artist to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

Vesica piscis

Mandorla, “almond,” the pointed-oval sign of the yoni, is used in oriental art to signify the divine female genital; also called vesica piscis, the Vessel of the Fish. Almonds were holy symbols because of their female, yonic connotations.

Christian art similarly used the mandorla as a frame for figures of God, Jesus, and saints, because the artists forgot what it formerly meant. I. Frazer, G.B., 403

For further details on the mandorla (also known as the “ya-ya”) see my June 12, 2002, note The Ya-Ya Monologues.

A somewhat less lurid use of the mandorla in religious art — the emblem of the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina, taken from the website of St. Michael’s Church in Charleston — is shown below.